By Nozomi Shima PZ ’25

There are a multitude of coming-of-age films that perfectly capture the scary, exciting, and vast feelings of becoming an adult. The genre dominates my Letterboxd Top 4 — Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” and Olivia Wilde’s “Booksmart” offering my high school self solace when I was freaking out about leaving my childhood home, parents, and city for Pitzer. While these movies will forever hold a place in my heart, I have to admit that they hit harder when I was 17 and mentally preparing for college.

Then, when I was 19, I cried every time I thought about not being a teenager anymore. It felt like all of the fear about growing up from high school that hadn’t quite been extinguished yet had surfaced in full force. It might sound like an arbitrary parameter, but being a person in their 20s felt so much bigger and more real than being a teenager. 

After I had sufficiently mourned my teenagehood, I tried to fully embrace entering my 20s. These are some of the essential movies that helped me deal with all of my big feelings about coming of age in early adulthood. 

Cha Cha Real Smooth 

I walked into the theater with little knowledge of “Cha Cha Real Smooth” and left with a new name on my favorite movie list. The comedy-drama is centered around Andrew, a recent college graduate who has moved back to his suburban hometown and works at a mall food court, scraping together savings to follow his college girlfriend to Europe. 

He accompanies his little brother to a bar mitzvah and his encouragement to get him on the dance floor attracts attention from parents who begin to hire him as a party starter, paid to bring shy kids out of their shells and let loose. 

At one of these bar mitzvahs, he meets Dakota Johnson’s Domino, a single mother to Lola, an autistic teen who has an especially hard time joining the party. Domino is impressed by Andrew’s ability to put both her and Lola at ease with his endearing and uplifting antics, and the three of them form an unexpected bond. 

Andrew is played by Cooper Raiff, who also acts as director, writer, and producer on the film, achieving a Woody Allen-like multi-hyphenate role and portraying himself as a precocious but down-on-his-luck main character. In comparison to Allen’s self-inserts, though, Andrew’s outward charm is not at the expense of his self-absorption; it is genuine, naïve, and well-intentioned. The way he extends patience and care to others despite dealing with his own struggles is refreshing, inviting us to do the same as we transition to post-college life. 

The Worst Person in the World

In Joachim Trier’s Norweigian film, we see a snapshot of four ever-evolving years in the life of Julie. She goes from medical student to psych student to pursuing a career in professional photography, from one long-term relationship to the next. She exemplifies how your 20s are a stronghold of indecision and challenging our moral boundaries while we balance personal growth and the prioritization of our desires. 

We see Julie’s evolution through two major relationships, first with a comic book artist with whom she forges a comfortable camaraderie but whose age, at 15 years her senior, starts to inform the seriousness of their relationship and the necessity to make subsequent life choices. She then meets a man while crashing a wedding, both unable to hide their attraction to one another despite being devoted to their respective relationships and testing the boundaries of infidelity. A gorgeous sequence of Julie running through the streets of Oslo while the rest of the world is frozen in time illustrates the emotional confrontations we make when faced with a forking path of decisions. 

One of the things I appreciated most about the film was the nuance of each character, unable to be defined by one thing through intimate views of what gives a person value despite their outward flaws. It’s easy to dismiss someone as problematic; it requires more emotional maturity and intelligence to have it in your heart to forgive someone and see them as worthwhile even after they have made mistakes. The film doesn’t aim to justify actions as much as to showcase the ability of someone to be both good and bad. It allows us to make space for the inevitable mistakes we will make while figuring out who we are and who we want to be. 

Frances Ha

Noah Baumbach’s quintessential collaboration with Greta Gerwig is “Frances Ha,” a black-and-white film following the titular Frances, a 27-year-old navigating her undecided life surrounded by decidedly settled friends in New York City. Her free-spirited way of life comes to a halt when her roommate and best friend from college tells her she’s moving into a new neighborhood with a different friend, forcing her to find a new apartment and confront her lack of substantial income as an apprentice at a dance company. 

Exploring a fascinating dynamic between long-time best friends whose lives start to diverge and focusing on the one who’s left behind, the film represents a fear I have yet to confront. Through her pursuit of happiness and unrelenting love for herself, she inspires integrity in the challenges of negotiating with real life when your person has found their person. 

In her signature clumsy narration, Gerwig delivers a line that captures a sentiment that I feel almost every day: “I’m so embarrassed. I’m not a real person yet.” In a woman in her late 20s, figuring out how to exist on her own both emotionally and financially, we find a beacon of hope that tells us that adulthood doesn’t mean we know exactly what’s going on all the time, but means taking life minute by minute and learning who we are, independent of our loved ones.